This interdisciplinary workshop takes description as a route to explore the ways in which our norms are embedded within and throughout language rather than reflecting external rules. While hard oppositions have been made between description and narration, pictorial and verbal, sound and sense, this workshop is attempting to create a vocabulary of description at different levels of languages, such that both the expression of norms and the improvisation of norms becomes evident. We seek to generate a new way of thinking about description which displaces the centrality accorded to propositions and indicative statements and rethinks the assumption that the object stands outside language.

Participants in the Workshop include Sandra Laugier, Jocelyn Benoist, Veena Das, Piergiorgio Donatelli, Clara Han, Andrew Brandel, Paola Marrati, Marco Mota, Alyson Cole, Bhrigupati Singh, Estelle Ferarese, Pascal Marty, among others. 

The Workshop is being held in collaboration with the International Network on Norms of Life (NOVI), the Department of Anthropology, and the Department of Comparative Thought and Literature.